1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the field of natural language processing, and in particular to a natural language based service selection system and method as well as a service query system and method, which can complement incomplete queries so as to obtain a selected service and provide the corresponding query answer.
2. Description of Prior Art
The existing service selection system based on natural language allows a user to query various services in natural language, and then the system selects any service corresponding to the user's query from these services and feeds the answer back to the user. Such conventional service selection system based on natural language, however, can process only a complete natural language query from the user. If the user enters an incomplete query, that is, the query lacks some essential parameters, the system has difficulty in effectively handling such query, especially in finding the lost part of the query.
There have been some natural language based service selection systems, which can analyze and retrieve a service database according to the query inputted by a user so as to select a service corresponding to the user query from various service.
Patent Application No. JP2002351913 proposes a method in which a web service having optimal waiting time can be selected from all types of web services according to the history of user access to these web services (which particularly contains user name, longest waiting time, service type, latest access time, etc.) so as to avoid excessive load on network and service.
Patent Application No. JP2004054781 discloses a method which can extracts key words for retrieval from a user query in natural language and then select from various services the service corresponding to the key words for retrieval.
Patent Application No. JP2004288118 provides a method which can, based on service register data supplied by a service provider, select not only a service corresponding to a user query but also other services relevant to the service from a plurality of services.